The Temptation of St. Anthony  

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"[Demons] taking the forms of women, wild beasts, creeping things."--Life of Antony


"Several painters have handled a subject of this kind, with a view of assembling as many horrid phantoms as their imagination could suggest; but all the designs I have chanced to meet of the temptation of St. Anthony were rather a sort of odd, wild grotesques, than anything capable of producing a serious passion. In all these subjects poetry is very happy. Its apparitions, its chimeras, its harpies, its allegorical figures, are grand and affecting; and though Virgil’s Fame and Homer’s Discord are obscure, they are magnificent figures. These figures in painting would be clear enough, but I fear they might become ridiculous." --A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) by Edmund Burke

The Temptation of St. Anthony detail from the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald
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The Temptation of St. Anthony detail from the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald

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The Temptation of St. Anthony is an episode in the life of the Christian monk Anthony the Great.

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